Sunday, April 14, 2013

The movies aren't the same

Even allowing for the natural tendency toward excess in
commemorating the recently departed, I found something rather offensive in
Barack Obama’s remarks that “for a generation of Americans - and especially Chicagoans
– Roger (Ebert) was the movies…The movies won't be the same without Roger.” It
rankles in part because Obama plainly doesn’t believe it – insofar as the
remarks make any sense, it’s certainly not true that Obama’s own experience of
cinema, or anyone else’s, has been entirely filtered through or shaped by what
Ebert had to say about it. And Ebert almost certainly wouldn’t have wanted it to be true – I’m sure he had a
healthy ego, but not to the point of desiring to be an all-defining gatekeeper,
rather than say a constructive facilitator or reference point. I know I may be
making too much of this, but Obama’s remarks tap into the same vein of lazy
supplication to institutional power that contributes to America’s endless
problems.

Roger Ebert

Of course, Ebert’s death was poignant
in several ways. I doubt anyone could have remained unmoved by his response to
his physical challenges. His final blog post, released the day before he died,
overflowed with unfulfilled plans and ambitions, including the comment that: “I'll
be able at last to do what I've always fantasized about doing: reviewing only
the movies I want to review.” This surely conveys something about the clouds
within every silver lining – if someone as powerful and rich and esteemed as
Ebert couldn’t have achieved such a modest fantasy years ago, then what hope
for the rest of us? In this regard, it’s also rather sad that his last review to
be published before he died was a forgettable bread-and-butter write-up of the
(presumably forgettable bread-and-butter) movie The Host. If Ebert was indeed the movies for one or more American
generations, it would be at least partly because of how, even by his own account,
he couldn’t help putting commercial interests ahead of his own, thus
symbolizing the audience’s perpetual surrender.

As far as I can tell, Ebert
didn’t review Romanian director Cristian Mongiu’s film Beyond the Hills (playing at the Bell Lightbox as I write, and no
doubt available soon in other formats). It would have been a much worthier
deployment of his stature and talents – this is the kind of film that needs,
well, any kind of attention at all, but in particular of a kind that encourages
patient, constructive engagement. Something other, that is, than the first line
of Rick Groen’s Globe and Mail review: “If you long for the bleak
intelligence of an Ingmar Bergman film, where humankind is deeply flawed and
God is indifferently silent and the landscape is cloaked in perpetual winter,
then Beyond the Hills
promises to be your cup of despair.” It’s accomplished phrase-making, but of
course the number of readers who long for such an experience is basically zero.
Although it appears that Groen intends for the review as a whole to be
positive, he’s already closed the gate.

Cup
of despair

It’s especially regrettable because in interviews, Mongiu
emphasizes the openness of his process, how as a director “sometimes you don’t
have a clue…(and) you think you control it all, but actually you don’t.”
Intertwined with his emphasis on simplicity – using only one shot per scene, no
music, no “funny angles” – and on promoting engaged viewership, on giving
“people all the detail and information they need to form their own opinion,”
this creates a remarkably engrossing, multi-faceted film, likely to be one of
the year’s most satisfying. And one in no way reducible to a “cup of despair.”

It’s set in more or less the present day (based on real-life
case from 2005), in a small Orthodox convent set above a small rural town,
where a young woman, Alina,comes to
visit one of the nuns, Voichita, with whom she more or less grew up in an
orphanage (and with whom she may have had a sexual relationship, although this
is one of the many points on which we must form our own opinion, or better,
accept our inability to do so). Alina wants Voichita to come away with her to
Germany; when Voichita refuses, unwilling to leave a structure in which she
feels secure and fulfilled, Alina’s behaviour becomes increasingly erratic,
leading to her hospitalization after something resembling an epileptic fit.
After the hospital, itself a strained institution, discharges her, the nuns and
the overseeing priest attempt to provide care, but the situation worsens,
causing them to believe she’s possessed, and to take the steps they think that
indicates.

Extending his first sentence, Groen reads the film as
denoting that “everyone is implicated, which makes guilt easy to assign but
very hard to define – it’s just our natural state.” But this grim metaphysical
fatalism seems directly contrary to Mongiu’s intentions, or to a fair reading
of the resulting work. If everyone is “implicated”, it’s only because everyone
is connected: Mongiu goes out of his way to show how the convent –
notwithstanding the very specific governing doctrines – has strong secular ties
to the community. One of the nuns is married and may go back to her husband,
and for orphanage girls, there may be no other option other than homelessness
(or worse, hinted at through brief references to a sexual abuser at the
orphanage, and via uncertainty over how Alina might be earning money in Germany
or previously); there’s a regular flow of commerce, donations and services
between the settlement and the town.

Warning
signs

Mongiu reinforces this through very tangible attention to
detail. When the nuns use ropes to tie Alina down, they’re the same ropes they
use to draw water from the well, and they have to ensure to retrieve them from
the hospital. Later on, the chains used to tie up the dog are similarly reused;
likewise, we understand the provenance of towels and sheets and planks. Lives
and actions are constant negotiations with what’s physically present and
available, and because that’s very little, the gaps in the world are achingly
wide. They may be filled by religion, or by the human structures that keep us
going regardless of whether we know why, or by what’s sometimes called hysteria
(which, we shouldn’t forget, has always been a convenient label to stick on
non-conforming women). In the film’s closing scenes, there is indeed much talk
about guilt, but Mongiu masterfully places it among the mundane, transient
preoccupations of the modern world. Perhaps justice will be done, as that’s
defined, but whether that bears any correlation with truth or progress is
unknowable.

Beyond the Hills doesn’t seem to me remotely
difficult to watch, nor unduly filled with despair, but of course, Mongiu’s
guiding principles are far removed from those of the mainstream, and so his
film must either be ignored or else smothered in warning signs. For a whole
generation, or several, of Americans and Canadians, that’s the movies.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).